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Vaccinate or Die?

Vaccines: claiming credit when none was due

“The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th Century United States”

The above paper was written by the economist David Cutler of Harvard University and research associate Grant Miller of Stanford University. They’re not ‘anti-vaxxers’ – they’re just two men looking at the effects of clean water and effective sewage systems in American cities, introduced between 1900 and 1936. You’ll see from the following graph that major infectious diseases dropped away long before vaccines were introduced, and long before vaccines took the credit for halting epidemics. The numbers relate to shares of total mortality (viz., the percentage of overall deaths from all causes.) I’ve added the right-hand column to detail when available vaccines were first introduced.

Cause of death

1900

1936

Vaccines

Major infectious disease

39.3

17.9

Too broad for vaccines

Tuberculosis

11.1

5.3

Mass vaccination

after WWII (post 1945)

Pneumonia

9.6

9.3

No vaccine

Diarrhoea and enteritis

7.0

n/a

Rotavirus vaccine not

introduced until 1998 (but

withdrawn due to safety

concerns)

Typhoid fever

2.4

0.1

No vaccine

Meningitis

2.4

0.3

No vaccine until 1969

Malaria

1.2

0.1

Vaccine still

in development

Smallpox

0.7

0.0

The earliest vaccine –

see Jayne Donegan below

Influenza

0.7

1.3

No vaccine until 1935.

Figures had increased (flu

is not water-borne)

Childhood Infectious

diseases

4.2

0.5

Broad category (no

vaccine)

Measles

0.7

0

First measles vaccine

1954

Scarlet fever

0.5

0.1

No vaccine

Whooping cough

0.6

0.2

Vaccine developed 1940s

Diphtheria and Croup

2.3

0.1

Vaccine fraught with

problems before mid-

1900s

Dr Jayne Donegan

I contacted Dr Jayne Donegan to congratulate her for standing firm against horrendous medical bullying, and she has subsequently, and very kindly, written the foreword for my new book, The Tip of the Needle.

Dr Donegan, a GP, questioned the UK’s vaccination programme and went to government records to find that vaccines did not eradicate diseases in this country. She was subsequently asked by two mothers to act as an expert witness in court, chiefly because their children’s fathers were insisting they be vaccinated. This culminated in Dr Donegan being pulled up before the General Medical Council, with the threat of being struck off and denied the right to practice as a doctor. The GMC failed – she was exonerated, but at great personal expense.

Here is an extract of the foreword, which I’m sure you’ll find interesting. Dr Donegan’s work validates Cutler and Millers’ work.

“Like all my medical and nursing colleagues, I was taught that vaccines were the reason children and adults stopped dying from diseases for which there were vaccines. Other diseases, such as Scarlet Fever, Rheumatic Fever, Typhus, Typhoid, Cholera and so on – for which there were no vaccines – were said to have diminished both in incidence and mortality (ability to kill) due to better social conditions. We never questioned whether all the reductions in deaths from infectious diseases might have been due to improved social conditions. The medical curriculum was so vast that we memorised what we were told: non vaccinatable diseases were placed in the social conditions box and vaccinatable diseases in the vaccines box, and then on to the next subject.

“This view was reinforced by everything I was taught and read in textbooks, both before I qualified as a doctor and through all of my post graduate training.

“Along with most doctors, I regarded parents who would not vaccinate their children as ignorant or, if not ignorant, sociopathic, for withholding what I then believed to be a life-saving intervention, and for putting everybody else at risk. I used to counsel the parents in the 1980s who did not want to vaccinate their children with the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. I told them that adverse reactions were associated with the vaccine, but that (we were told) the chances of having an adverse reaction with the disease itself was ten times greater, so any sensible parent would opt for vaccination.

“Then in 1994 came the ‘Measles Rubella Campaign’ where seven million school children were vaccinated. The letter from the Chief Medical Officer said there was a measles epidemic coming. I discovered some time later that this was based on a hypothetical, computerised model.

“Two things worried me about the campaign. The first was that someone who had already had two doses of a measles containing vaccine would still not be immune when an epidemic came. I had been counselling parents about pertussis vaccine based on the likelihood, and the stated aim, that the vaccine would, in most cases, stop their child getting the disease. But even with two shots of a one shot vaccine (with whatever adverse reactions that entailed), your child could still be at risk of contracting the disease (with whatever risk that entailed) when the epidemic came, unless they were vaccinated a third time (with whatever risk that entailed). The benefit, not to mention the efficacy was becoming much less clear cut.

“The second concern was that we were being told that the best way of interrupting disease transmission was to vaccinate en masse and break the ‘chain of transmission’. If en masse was the best way, then why did we vaccinate two, three and four month old babies? Why didn’t we just wait three years and vaccinate everyone who had been born or moved into the area, and break the chain of transmission?

“This was the start of my long, slow journey of researching vaccination, the history of medicine and disease ecology, and learning about other models and philosophies of health and natural hygiene such as those used by the great pioneers who cleaned up our cities and built clean water supplies and sewage systems.

“I spent hundreds of hours in libraries looking at archived journals and textbooks, and looking at government data within the Office for National Statistics (ONS). I was getting out dusty volumes from the middle of the nineteenth century to make graphs of death rates from vaccinatable diseases which, for some reason, have not been made available by the ONS or the Department of Health. “I read what prominent men of science, medical officers for health and doctors wrote about vaccination and its sequelae that never made it into today’s textbooks. I found out what anyone with even a passing acquaintance with disease figures of the 19th and 20th century knew. For example, that 99% of the people in England and Wales who used to die from whooping cough had stopped dying before the vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. The same happened with measles. Even the success story of smallpox vaccination was not what it seemed: the enforcement of the compulsory smallpox vaccination law in 1867, when the death rate was already falling, was accompanied by an increase in the deaths from 100 to 400 deaths per million population.

“I also started to learn about ‘health’ as opposed to ‘disease’ which is what I had studied at medical school. I began to gain an understanding of why people get infections and how they can be supported through them, so that they come out more healthy, rather than more ill.” Despite being up against the entire might of the Establishment, Dr Donegan was shown to be right, and continues to practice as a doctor. The GMC failed because the research Dr Donegan unearthed was true: vaccines did not reduce disease incidence – hygiene and sanitation did.

Nutrition and Infection

Those of us who have moved our dogs away from processed pet food and onto real food (aka raw food), have done so because we have been persuaded that they will remain healthy if fed correctly. We have largely relied upon ‘anecdote’ (other peoples’ experiences) which, in scientific terms, is way down at the bottom of the acceptable evidence pyramid. Many of us have also stopped vaccinating, based upon the rationale – backed by scientific research – that vaccines destroy health. Instead, we hope that diet will enable our dogs to overcome viral and bacterial diseases that might come their way. The question is: – is this just hope, or do we have valid science to support our stance?

The Science Behind Nutrients and Infection

Essentially, when you cook inferior quality ingredients that are not suitable to a species and package them up as ‘food’, you withhold vital nutrients from your dog. This makes the dog less able to fight viral and bacterial infection. Here’s some research to show how humans fare when they are malnourished:

In a UK TV documentary in April 2014, scientists reported their findings after exhuming victims of the Great Plague in London where, during a period of weeks, six in every ten people died of the bubonic plague. Archaeologists found that the plague epidemic came after weather changes had made food scarce, and plague victims’ bones showed they were suffering from severe malnutrition. Malnutrition causes epidemics; malnutrition enables viruses and bacterins to create harm. It was malnutrition that allowed bubonic plague to see over half the population of London off.

In another example, malnutrition was assessed in relation to whooping cough in the UK. Mathematical modelling showed that epidemics were driven by seasonal weather conditions and increases in wheat prices. These two factors predicted the force of infection and the number of people who died. The same authors found a correlation between malnutrition, population size, weather, and measles epidemics. Another paper states: “Infection and malnutrition have always been intricately linked. Malnutrition is the primary cause of immunodeficiency worldwide … There is a strong relationship between malnutrition and infection and infant mortality, because poor nutrition leaves children underweight, weakened, and vulnerable to infections, primarily because of epithelial integrity and inflammation.” Essentially, without proper nutrition, specifically vitamin A, the body’s digestive and mucosal barriers are impaired, leading to inflammation and infection.

A Cochrane review found that vitamin A megadoses lowered the number of deaths from measles in hospitalised children under the age of two years. A later Cochrane review found that vitamin A supplementation actually reduced the incidence of measles in healthy children aged six months to five years. Another paper showed that zinc increases the competence of the immune system, producing a greatly enhanced response to infection. The risk of children suffering from flu can be reduced by 50% if they take vitamin D, doctors in Japan found. Vitamin D, which is naturally produced by the human body when exposed to direct sunlight, has no significant side effects for humans, costs little and can be several times more effective than anti-viral drugs or vaccines. Another journal argues that it’s possible that selenium deficiency in host populations may foster viral replication, possibly triggering outbreaks of Ebola and perhaps even facilitating the emergence of more virulent viral strains.

In 1968, the World Health Organisation published “Interactions of Nutrition and Infection,” which suggested that the relationship between infection and malnutrition was a synergistic one. The Copenhagen Consensus project on hunger and malnutrition even suggested that “efforts to provide vitamin A, iron, iodine, and zinc generate higher returns than do trade liberalization or malaria, water, and sanitation programs.”

Farmer Dick Roper proved the point with his dairy herd, reported before the UK launched itself into a massive badger killing spree. For almost a decade, Mr Roper had been leaving cakes made from sugary molasses laced with supplements, including high doses of selenium, near the badgers’ setts on his land as a way of keeping their immune systems in prime condition. “Everything I read pointed to the trace element selenium being the solution,” Roper said, “so I decided to make cakes of molasses with the highest dose of selenium permitted. I got Ministry permission and started leaving my cakes outside the setts in the woods. This has worked for nearly a decade in a TB hot spot but I can’t understand why Defra has not done more research into my theory…I don’t believe badgers have to be shot.” The Badger Trust and Soil Association also called for research. The Soil Association said: “We back Dick Roper’s call for more research into the effects he has discovered. It is a health strategy which would be far preferable to culling.” Defra declined to comment.

In short, it would be far more effective, and less dangerous, to give people and animals clean water and proper nutrition than subject them to the multi-billion vaccine programme. Why isn’t Defra interested? Well, after spending more than 20 years trying to reduce the over-vaccination of dogs, I’m pretty convinced that our government is part of the vaccine industry.

In Store: What Vets Don’t Tell You About Vaccines

Vets around the world were advising pet owners to vaccinate their animal companions against disease every year. In the author's opinion, annual vaccination is neither necessary, nor safe.

In the revised, updated edition the author brings fresh information and explains why she feels you can protect your dogs and cats from disease homeopathically, without risking their lives at the same time..